Abstract: Cognitive radio is an emerging technology for the opportunistic use of under utilized spectrum. It promises to change the future technological trends forever if employed properly. Spectrum sensing is the major function of a cognitive radio network. This paper proposes a new strategy to optimize the overall performance in cooperative spectrum sensing. Optimization strategy is proposed in order to optimize the overall performance by varying the SNR. We consider optimization of cooperative spectrum sensing with energy detection to minimize the total error rate. Here we derive optimal voting rule for optimal value of cognitive radios. The effects of spectrum sensing technique type that used locally at each CR, the local SNR, and the total number of cooperated CRs on the optimal fusion rule are found. The Energy Detector(ED) spectrum sensing technique is used as local spectrum sensing techniques. Here, different error levels are founded by varying the SNR values to find the optimal number of CRs for minimizing the error levels.

Keywords: Cognitive Radio, Spectrum Sensing, Optimization, Cooperative Spectrum Sensing.